looking for couple paragraph summary on this rengadi I have listed about the economic meltdown of 2008.

On September 18, 2008, the Secretary of Treasury Henry Paulson and the Chairman of the Federal Reserve Ben Bernanke arrive for an emergency meeting at the Capitol.

On Thursday, late afternoon, they go to Nancy Pelosi's office, and there's a meeting of the senior legislators from both parties in both House and Senate.

In the past seven months, they had bailed out one bank and let another one fail, nationalized three of the nation's largest companies, and watched in horror as the credit markets froze.

It was obviously a big meeting. I had no idea I was gonna hear what I heard. We turned it right over to Ben Bernanke and Hank Paulson.

And they said they needed the authority to use $700 billion to unstop the credit markets.

And sitting in that room with Hank Paulson saying to us in a very measured tone, no hyperbole, no excessive adjectives, that unless you act, the financial system of this country and the world will melt down in a matter of days.

Bernanke said, if we don't do this tomorrow, we won't have an economy on Monday.

There was literally a pause in that room where the oxygen left.

Tonight, from the board rooms on Wall Street to the back rooms in Washington, Frontline goes inside the meltdown.

The story begins in the spring of 2008, after the housing bubble had burst. Wall Street had gambled heavily on home mortgages, especially risky ones. As the housing market crashed, fear crept in. What if there were a run on any of the Wall Street houses? Then, on Monday, March 10, a rumor about Bear Stearns.

Pretty normal morning. And then suddenly, around 11 o'clock, there's a tremor. The stock starts to go down. The CFO of Bear starts calling down to his desks to the repo guys, bond guys.

Anybody hear anything? Anybody know anything? What is this? Yeah. The rumor is that we're running out of cash, and that we might be in trouble.

Bear's former chairman Alan "Ace" Greenberg had seen it happen before.

Rumors are such that they just can plain put you out of business. People that you have been doing business with for years, all of a sudden they just say, no, we don't want to touch it.

On the Street, they say rumors, even unfounded rumors, are a contagion that can kill a company in just a few days.

--causing the stock the most activity. But Bear Stearn's suffering from, well, what you can do with any of these stocks these days, namely start a rumor.

CNBC is ubiquitous on trading desks. It's ubiquitous on Wall Street. People watch it absolutely all day long. They tune into it. When there are flash lines up on the screen, they want to tune in immediately. So they have a profound impact on what's happening.

It was nothing short of surreal. You're watching on CNBC, et cetera. I mean, they're talking about where you work.

The only bank in red right now, basically Bear Stearns, although it is dragging the rest of the financial markets down as well.

Bear's stock was in free fall. Once it traded as high as $171. Now, it hovered around $60.

When people get nervous, they what their money out, because you don't want to be the last person when there's a run on the bank. The stock started to go down. More and more people called up and said, I want my money out, or I won't trade with Bear Sterns. And it just completely unwound.

And it happens because those who do business with a firm such as that lose confidence. And when they lose confidence, they pull their lines. And that's it It's done. Pack your bags and go home.

Inside Bear, they knew they needed to reassure the market. They turned to former chairman Ace Greenberg.

Somebody came over to me and said, you gotta make a statement. We're in trouble. I called the chief financial officer. I said, are we in trouble? He said, no, everything's fine.

They had nearly $18 billion in cash reserves. Ace called CNBC.

So I said, it's ridiculous. Everything's fine, which it was.

He says, this is ridiculous, which then kind of, as they say, put pants on the problem. Because CNBC then starts running a crawler, "Ace Greenberg calls rumors of imminent demise ridiculous," which is a little bit like screaming, I'm really not beating my wife, honest.

There's a very sharp rally on Wall Street, with the exception of Bear Stearns. It has been a roller coaster day for Bear Stearns.

The rumors swirling around Bear were about its massive investments in subprime mortgages, what would become known as toxic assets.

They were big in mortgages. They were big in packaging them and creating securities out of them, buying them.

The road to riches for Bear was simple-- buy hundreds of thousands of mortgages, then bundle them into securities and sell them to investors.

30 years ago, if you got a mortgage, you went to a bank. And that bank frisked you pretty good before giving you the money, because the bank expected you to pay the bank back. In 2005, a mortgage lender lends money to a lot of people and does not expect to be repaid by them, but bundles up the right to be repaid by them and sells it to a lot of other people.

The bigger the housing market grew, the more Bear and other investment banks bought.

Accelerating housing prices created a mentality among everybody involved in the mortgage industry from the buyer of the house to the mortgage broker to the bank to Wall Street that housing prices could only go up.

Everybody did this. Everybody make tons of money in '05, '06.

By '07, the party was over.

People started to see that foreclosures were rising. Certainly, the home price appreciation that we had enjoyed for many years during the bubble was stopping.

They were stuck with these investments that were rapidly declining in value.

It was a formula for disaster. It was a traditional game of hot potato, hot potato. And as it turned out, everybody ended up with the potato.

As the smallest investment bank on Wall Street, Bear Stearns looked vulnerable. Wednesday, two days into the crisis, they needed to do something to restore confidence.

If you're a Wall Street firm beset by rumors, the best you can do is bring out the CEO to say, well, this is really nothing serious. And by Wednesday morning, that's where Bear had come to.

I called over to their head of PR, talked to him about it, saying, your stock just keeps getting hammered. I talked to a lot of people, and I think they would want to hear from Alan.

Alan Schwartz, Bear's CEO, decided to give Faber the interview.

Joining me now first on CNBC is Alan Schwartz. He is Bear Stearn's president and CEO. Mr. Schwartz, thanks so much for being here this morning.

Everything went quiet on the training floor as we listened to the interview. Everyone was very focused on listening, because we knew this would be the nexus point for how the rest of the week would play out.

So when I'm told by a hedge fund that I know well that last night they tried to close out a mortgage credit protection--

Faber's first question was a tough one. He raised the specter that one of Bear's most important trading partners, Goldman Sachs, might be deserting them.

You're saying not aware that that would be the case.

I'm not aware on a specific trade from one counterparty to another.

If you're just living out in Schenectady, that doesn't sound all the bad. In fact, that is a kiss of death. He has all but driven the spear through Schwartz's heart, because he's saying that Bear Stearns is not trustworthy in the eyes of those it trades with.

For Bear, it turns out to be a big blow, because it's a public acknowledgement of what sounds like a specific example. And Alan looks to some people like he's not on the ball.

And I think the situation, with time, will stabilize.

Well, Alan Schwartz, thank you so much for being here this morning. Appreciate it.

Bear had borrowed heavily to invest in toxic assets and other high-risk securities. To survive, it would have to find more lenders willing to loan it money.

Bear Stearns rolls over its loans every night or every few nights in what's known as the repo market. And that gives its lenders an opportunity each night, if they want to, to call in some of their loans or to demand more collateral. What this amounts to effectively is that investment banks, there's a vote of confidence every night on whether they survive or not.

And that night, the markets were voting no confidence in Bear Stearns. Their stock was dropping, and the cash reserves were beginning to dwindle.

This stuff became a self-fulfilling prophecy. A lot of people that perhaps would not have acted in listening to some of the things that were going on said, I can't leave my assets there anymore, and I have to take them out.

You're sitting in the middle of an avalanche. What can you do if you're on the side of a mountain, and an avalanche comes at you? An avalanche goes what, 60 miles an hour? You can't outrun it, right? So what can you do?

The story has continued to mushroom. There are concerns amongst perhaps some foreign banks--

On Thursday, Bear's stock continued to fall, and the reserve was almost completely gone.

By 6 o'clock, it's very clear that they do not have enough money to open the next day. They have 12 to 14 hours to do something unprecedented in terms of raising emergency capital or go under.

They had one last chance, the Federal Reserve Bank in New York. Tim Geithner was in charge.

Geithner is a Larry Summers protege from Treasury. He worked his way up during the Summers' years at Treasury.

He's 47 years old. He looks like he's about 32. Universally liked and respected.

Extremely smart, extremely aware of the stuff, very discreet, controlled.

And he sort of serves as an intermediary between Washington and Wall Street, because he sits in Manhattan, but he works for the Federal Reserve System.

That night, Bear Stearns' fate would be in Tim Geithner's hands.

Geithner's people went to Bear's headquarters and started to look through all the accounts. Geithner told me he initially thought that they should let Bear go under.

By midnight, by 1:00, 2:00 in the morning, everybody and their mother has teams at Bear-- Morgan, the Fed, the SEC. And they find out Bear is stuffed to the gills with toxic waste.

They found billions in hidden subprime mortgage loans and something worse-- credit default swaps, a form of insurance. Bear had promised if bonds it insured failed, they would pay.

They were really very mysterious instruments that only the sort of financial wizards understood.

A credit default swap is basically just an agreement that I have with you where I sell you insurance on some bond you own. If the bond goes belly up, I promise to pay you. And as long as the bond doesn't go belly up, you pay me for selling you insurance.

Geithner's investigators told him that Bear had made credit default swap deals worth hundreds of billions of dollars all over Wall Street and around the world.

Through the night, things changed as the people in the Fed discovered the positions that Bear was in and discovered what would happen if they did go under.

Because Bear Stearns was so indebted to so many other people, their failure to repay their debt or pay their debts would cause a cascade of other failures.

Every single part of Wall Street at this point is plugged into another part of Wall Street. And if I go down, I can now drag down that guy. And if he goes down, he can drag down that guy, and he can drag down that guy. And this is a huge web that connects everyone in these completely unforeseen ways.

They then that reported back to Geithner that, look, this is a lot more complicated than it appears.

Geithner saw what central bankers fear most-- systemic risk. Bear was frighteningly interconnected with other banks up and down Wall Street. Geithner picked up a phone at 4:00 in the morning and called his boss at the Federal Reserve, Ben Bernanke.

Ben Bernanke is a highly, highly respected scholar, and not only a scholar of economics, but of the Great Depression. If he weren't chairman of the Fed, he'd be top of the list of people you'd be going to for advice and understanding in all this stuff.

On this night, one of the Depression expert's darkest fears was being realized.

Ben Bernanke felt that the risk to the system, the financial system as a whole, would be too great if Bear Stearns were allowed to go bankrupt.

It was clear that this had to be contained. There was no doubt in his mind. He more than anyone else appreciated what would happen if we get out of control.

He was absolutely determined to be an activist Fed governor. That when the crisis came along, his Fed would throw every weapon it had at the problem.

But the Federal Reserve was prohibited from directly lending cash to Bear, an unregulated investment bank. Bernanke was prepared to get around the rules, and he did.

Very early in the morning, the Federal Reserve has a conference call. Ben Bernanke's on it. Tim Geithner's on it, among others.

They eventually came up with this idea of giving a loan to JP Morgan, which was Bear's clearing bank, and having JP Morgan pass on the cash to Bear, so indirectly lending to them via JP Morgan.

We have important news to share with you about Bear Stearns, a company that I've been reporting on all week. We interviewed the CEO, Alan Schwartz, earlier this week.

It was about 8:30 that they announced the deal.

Let me share with you this press release that has just hit. "The Federal Reserve Bank and JP Morgan Chase announce that they have agreed to provide secured funding to Bear Stearns as necessary."

Make no mistake. The Federal Reserve is bailing out Bear Stearns, and they're using JP Morgan as a conduit to do it.

But Bernanke's unprecedented plan almost immediately backfired.

Because Bear Stearns was the only one to get that treatment, obviously the Fed was sending a message-- this is an institution that's about to fail. So to single them out, in a sense, was to virtually assign them to a death sentence.

People are starting to trade this company as if its entire fate is totally in question at this point.

At the opening at 9:30, you promptly have basically a 50% sell-off in the stock.

At 10 o'clock Eastern time, and Bear Stearns hit $30, and people sort of gasped as it hit $30. And two things that were going around. Number one, Bear Stearns now has a market cap of $3.7 billion, smaller than--

In Washington at the Treasury Department, the secretary, Henry Paulson, was also beginning to worry about systemic risk.

Paulson was picturing a 1,000 to 2,000 point drop in the Dow that Monday, possibly the failure in very short order of a number of other investment banks-- Lehman Brothers, Morgan Stanley, and so on. Paulson just thought that the uncertainty was too great.

Paulson thought he knew the markets well. Only two years before, he had run Bear's largest competitor.

Henry Paulson came from Goldman Sachs. He was the chief executive officer. He came up through the investment banking world.

He's a true Wall Street nuts-and-bolts guy. Not the most articulate man, very smart, very, very intense.

The loan to save Bear was not Henry Paulson's idea or style. It was the Fed's call. From now on though, Paulson would get involved. He and Ben Bernanke would face the crisis together.

It helps me to think about this crisis as a patient that's going through spasms. And each time, the spasms seem to be getting worse. And it helps me to think about Bernanke and Paulson as the two doctors in the room trying to settle the patient down.

Saturday morning, hundreds of lawyers and accountants from Bear's competitors descended to examine the books.

It was like being picked over in a cemetery. The body was dead or dying, so there were people picking over the carcass. It's just really the ugliest thing I've ever seen.

In the end, no one wants to take on Bear Stearns' debt. But on Sunday morning, Bernanke pushed back. Creating a shotgun marriage between Bear and JP Morgan. Paulson went along as Bernanke guaranteed the deal with a $30 billion dowry to cover Bear's toxic assets.

I'd say it was certainly the lending of $30 billion against those securities made it palatable for JP Morgan to go ahead. Without that, there wouldn't have been a deal.

But Paulson still had misgivings. He immediately issued a warning to Wall Street-- this was not going to happen again. He invoked a central precept of the catechism of the free market, moral hazard.

I'm as aware as anyone is of moral hazard. I'm also aware of--

Moral hazard poses the question if you bail somebody out of a problem they themselves cause, what incentive will they have the next time to avoid making the same mistake?

As a hard-bitten veteran of Wall Street, Paulson had personally made hundreds of millions of dollars believing the best government was no government.

He's an unapologetic free marketeer. He's a Republican. He has that deregulatory mindset that the Bush administration has. That's why he was chosen.

And that same Sunday afternoon, as the very last details of the deal were being ironed out, Paulson decided to starkly make the moral hazard point. He picked up the phone and called JP Morgan's CEO.

Paulson wanted to send a message that this was not going to be a bailout that you're going to like if you're Bear Stearns. You did dumb things, and you're going to be punished.

30% of Bear's stock was held by its own employees. At the end of the week, that stock was selling for $30 a share. JP Morgan was offering $4.

Paulson says, no. I want you to do it for $2 a share. We don't want anyone in America, particularly on Wall Street, to think that the government has a safety net for you whenever you need it. I want it to be so, so painful for any Bear Stearns shareholder that it's almost as if they went out of business.

At 6:00, the Bear employees receive the word.

A lot of price talk that we had been hearing was in the $20 range, maybe $15. So when they announced that we are being sold to JP Morgan for the princely sum of $2 per share, it was a shock.

There were people that actually cried.

People thought it was a misprint. They thought there must've been a couple of zeros left off. They were wrong. It was $2.

How could this possibly have happened? Total denial, no responsibility.

It had taken seven days. Bear Stearns was gone.

They're saying that the bubble will not burst.

July was still the strongest housing sales month.

Bear Stearns had not been alone betting on housing. Until the markets collapsed, the entire country had been encouraged to do the same thing.

You could see that people were taking mortgages that they obviously couldn't afford.

You'd go to a cocktail party, or you'd go to a barbecue, and two or three of the people that were there were telling you how wealthy they were because the value of their home had gone so high.

Nobody cared if they could afford the payments, because the act of buying a house itself meant that you were going to get rich.

The government's attitude towards homeowners was they did it to themselves. That's the way goes. The government's attitude towards Wall Street was these are a bunch of smart, sophisticated people. Gee, yeah, they made some mistakes. But the system is fine, and we'll be OK.

I have the greatest confidence in the resiliency, flexibility, and strength of our economy and our capital markets.

Both Paulson and Bernanke continued to insist all was well in the face of mounting evidence that the housing market had turned toxic.

The impact of the problems in the subprime market seems likely to be contained.

"Contained." That was their word, "contained," meaning that it was not gonna spread. It wasn't going to infect the rest of the economy.

When will the economy turn around?

Yes.

I'm not an economist, but I do believe that we're growing. And I can remember the press conference here, people yelling recession this, recession that, as if you're economists. And I'm an optimist. I believe there's a lot of positive things for our economy.

Profits in the banking industry are plunging.

The jobless rate in America has now soared to 6.1%.

The Dow tumbled 240 points, while the NASDAQ sank--

Throughout the summer of 2008, the toxic mortgages continued to eat away at every major Wall Street firm.

The losses on housing are real. The losses on subprime mortgages are real. And there is something like $1 trillion of losses to the financial system that are going to show up one way or another.

Nervous investors were dumping shares of the mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.

The next crisis wouldn't be on Wall Street. Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the largest mortgage lenders in the world.

Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac are in big trouble.

A crisis of confidence started. And in two weeks, two of the most powerful, largest companies on Earth lost 60% of their stock value.

Created by the government to promote affordable housing, the failure of these publicly-traded, privately-run companies was almost unthinkable. They held $5 trillion in mortgages.

They're enormous. Every institutional investor owns either Fannie and Freddie shares, or more importantly, Fannie and Freddie debt.

Their possible failure would be the very definition of systemic risk.

Bernanke and Paulson feared this could be a major catastrophe, and they had to do something about it.

Henry Paulson swallowed hard and nationalized Fannie and Freddie.

Good morning, everyone. We have determined that it is necessary to take action.

The government fired the management and took over the day-to-day operations.

Clearly, Bernanke and Paulson didn't want to nationalize Fannie and Freddie. That was the last thing they wanted, but the sort of logic of events just led them down there.

We examined all options available and determined the FHFA, the Federal Reserve, and Treasury have moved to address this difficult issue.

It sent this huge confidence shock wave through the entire economy. Because all of a sudden, people are saying, if two of the largest companies on Earth can fail, that means anyone could fail. At that point, there is no company too large to not fail from the housing bubble.

One day later, Monday, September 8, the toxic mortgage contagion was loose again.

That statement certainly true in the case of Lehman Brothers, shares of which have been down as much as 18% this morning.

This time, it was the investment bank Lehman Brothers. Its chief, Dick Fuld, was a fixture on Wall Street.

He was Wall Street's longest-serving CEO. My impression is most people would associate Dick Fuld and Lehman Brothers as one.

He was an aggressive trader, and he ran the company with an aggressive direction. He not only commanded and demanded loyalty, I think he inspired loyalty.

Fuld had been with Lehman for so long that a certain type of arrogance had crept into how Lehman did business. They had drunk their own Kool-Aid.

Fuld had taken Lehman deeply into the high-risk real estate mortgage market. The employers in the trenches saw it firsthand.

We kept pushing the envelope on acceptable loan terms. There were fixed-rate, 30-year loans. Then. we had these alternative aid loans. Then, we had 40-year loans. Then, we had loans where people only paid the interest and didn't have to pay principal back for 10 years.

Then, we had optional ARMs that had very low rates. And in fact, not only were you not paying back principal, in fact, your principal grew over time. I think in hindsight it's easy to see there was a bubble. But when you're at a party having a good time, sometimes it's hard to stop and leave the party.

Now, in the wake of Fannie and Freddie, those toxic investments that had made Lehman billions we're dragging it under.

When there are rumors spread or uncertainties about the sanctity of a financial institution, that liquidity can dry up very quickly.

It was melting. It was painful. The stock price was going lower every day. We didn't get lot of good news on CNBC.

That is a new low for Lehman Brothers, the embattled investment bank.

Lehman Brothers' stock has been plummeting along with confidence in its ability to survive.

At the Treasury, Secretary Paulson was watching the Lehman meltdown.

So Hank Paulson's sitting there, and it turns out that we're having the largest crisis Wall Street has seen since the Great Depression. And he's at the center of it. And at this point, the question becomes, what does Hank Paulson do?

Hank Paulson started to show signs of bailout exhaustion. He had literally just finished resolving the Fannie Mae/Freddie Mac problem.

And Paulson was under immense political pressure.

You had a conservative head in the Treasury and a conservative administration. There was a lot of right wing criticism over Bear Stearns. I had the Republican members of the Committee on Financial Services wanting to tear into Paulson and Bernanke for what they did to Bear Stearns.

Do you really think we can believe exactly what you're saying, Secretary Paulson?

I was sort of defending them against their own Republican colleagues. You had people saying, hey, look, this is the market. If you don't let some people go belly up, then you lose the discipline of the market.

Paulson really thought somebody's got to go down. We can't keep putting the finger in the dyke.

When he'd run Goldman Sachs, Hank Paulson had vigorously competed with Dick Fuld. Now, in a series of tough telephone conversations, Paulson insisted that Fuld find a buyer for Lehman Brothers.

Fuld and Paulson were in regular contact over the course of summer. Paulson was warning Fuld that the firm ran the risk of failure if it didn't act very quickly.

But it appears Fuld never thought the government would let Lehman fail.

There must have been a sense inside that it too would somehow survive, be merged, some shotgun marriage.

I thought it would be something similar to the Bear Stearns. There would be some arranged merger acquisition.

If Bear was a problem, Lehman was certainly more of a problem-- larger firm, more interconnected. They never thought-- how could they not-- they're gonna figure out a way to save them.

Now, moral hazard seemed to be driving Paulson's decision. If Fuld didn't sell his company, he would pay for Lehman's greed.

When I interviewed the secretary of the Treasury, I was really astounded at the vehemence of his reaction towards Dick Fuld. He was very angry. And whether that predated him being Treasury secretary or not, I don't know. But he was very, very angry.

He said, I told Dick Fuld to sell the firm or to look for a buyer, because he had a problem. And he wouldn't do it. And he's just practically pounding the table with his fist.

At this point, he makes a critical decision because this issue of moral hazard that Lehman will be allowed to fail.

It was a very high stakes game of signaling that he was playing. He wanted to show these guys, all of his old buddies on Wall Street, that they were going to need to step up and do something themselves.

Friday night. After the markets closed, Paulson and Bernanke summoned the heads of Wall Street's largest firms to the Federal Reserve Bank in New York.

They walked through the main foyer past this giant bronze statue, through this stone hallway, and into a large conference room.

They wanted to make sure the message from the federal government was clear. There would be no bailout.

Bernanke told them that now is the time for collective action. They couldn't spend their time this weekend looking out for their individual interests. They had to find a way to resolve the problem for all of Wall Street.

Tim Geithner says, somebody needs to buy Lehman. You need to figure out how to rescue Lehman, because otherwise they're going to go bankrupt.

Geithner pointed out to the group that there was no political will for a bailout in Washington.

That weekend. a now familiar sight-- Lehman's books opened up to their competitors. Now, Dick Fuld was desperate to do a deal.

On that last weekend, they really did think they had a deal lined up with either Bank of America or Barclays. But neither Bank of America nor Barclays were willing to do the deal without the same kind of government guarantees that Bear Stearns got. And this time, unfortunately for Lehman, unfortunately for Mr. Fuld, this time the government said no.

Moral hazard trumped systemic risk. The government would not intervene. There were no options left. Bankruptcy was now a certainty.

Good afternoon, everyone, and I hope you all had an enjoyable weekend.

The Fed and the Treasury thought that Lehman could go under without causing a major conflagration. It would be a big event, but it wouldn't cause a cataclysm.

But the American people can remain confident in the soundness and the resilience of our financial system. Thank you very much.

As soon as he left this room, Paulson would be told the markets were crashing.

The stock market dropped by hundreds of points right from the open.

Lehman Brothers had been far more interconnected than Paulson believed. Systemic risk became a reality.

No bank wants to lend to any other bank, because they're afraid that the other bank won't be able to pay them back, even though this interbank lending is at the very, very heart of the worldwide banking system.

Banks stopped lending. The credit markets froze.

We're no longer just talking about mortgages. We're talking about car loans, loans to small businesses, commercial paper borrowing by large banks. Commercial banks are now infected. This is like a disease spread.

There's nobody able to get a loan, these short-term loans. The safest companies in the world, the most rock solid banks in the world, unable to borrow money.

Everything freezes, and that's what caused the crisis. And it really started because Lehman Brothers went into bankruptcy. No one forecasted that this was going to happen, but it turns out that this one decision made all the difference.

Investors were shaken by Lehman's bankruptcy.

The meltdown was happening. Commerce in America was grinding to a halt.

I'm sure that Paulson is sitting there, and he doesn't strike me as the most reflective guy necessarily. But he must have been sitting there, everybody was sitting there saying, my god, we may be presiding over the second Great Depression. This is the utter nightmare of an economic policy maker. You're sitting there, and you may have just made the decision that destroyed the world. An absolutely terrifying moment.

With the credit markets frozen, there was soon a new big company at risk.

AIG plunging. At one point, they were down 70%.

The world's largest insurance company, AIG, has invested tens of billions of their insurance profits in risky investments tied to the housing market.

AIG has problems that make everybody else's problems look like child's play.

AIG does not have the money in the bank to support the commitments it made.

They face the hammer of a credit ratings agency downgrade, which would force them come up with tens of billions of dollars.

AIG had sold hundreds of billions of dollars of unregulated credit default swaps, insurance policies based on the bet that companies like Lehman Brothers would never go bankrupt. Now, the unthinkable had happened. Lehman was bankrupt.

When Lehman goes bankrupt, all a sudden AIG says, we're sitting on this huge deficit. We just promised to pay all these people millions and millions of dollars if Lehman went bankrupt, assuming that Lehman could never possibly go bankrupt, and now Lehman has gone bankrupt.

If AIG can't raise $20 billion, they'll have to announce bankruptcy tonight.

AIG desperately needed cash, but now the credit markets were frozen. No one was lending money. Paulson and Bernanke were their only hope.

AIG was the biggest insurance company in the country. It had sold trillions of dollars worth of credit default swaps. It did business with every big bank and institution in the world, basically.

For there to be such a global, precipitous failure of an organization like AIG, I think would have been very, very disruptive. I think everybody realized that.

They swallow hard, and they do what they have to do. And so much for moral hazard, right? So much for moral hazard, because you can't let AIG fail.

They had to throw their principles out the door and save the economy. And whatever criticism there would be of government intervention was a small price to pay for the deluge that would have occurred if AIG had collapsed.

Key members of Congress, many of whom still knew few specifics, were called.

Paulson and Bernanke asked us to meet with them and said, we're giving them $85 billion. I said to Bernanke, do you have $85 billion? He said, I got $800 billion.

Bernanke lent AIG $85 billion. The United States government now controlled the world's largest insurance company.

We have, effectively, a full nationalization, and the government taking an 80% ownership stake in AIG.

As the system crumbled and one firm after another faced uncertainty, a strong feeling began to sweep over Wall Street. Maybe the government, maybe Paulson and Bernanke, had lost control of the situation.

There's been a sense that there isn't an overarching plan. And that, I think, contributed to a sense that there wasn't someone in control and that the government was reacting instead of acting. And that was damaging to confidence.

The stock market suffered one of its worst days in years. The Dow Jones Industrial Average lost more than 4%.

Wednesday. It's been just two days since Lehman collapsed.

All hell has broken loose. And by that time, Bernanke at the Fed is looking at the Great Depression and all he's learned about what should have been done to save the American public from the Great Depression

Bernanke was nearly out of ammunition.

There's only a limit to what the Federal Reserve can do. Indeed, many people would think they've gone beyond the normal limits of what a central bank should do.

Bernanke decided to try something new. To do it, he'd have to get Paulson on board.

Bernanke basically calls up Paulson and says, there's no end to game in sight that looks good. Things only look like they're going to get worse. We have to do something more direct, more direct involvement of government in the banking sector.

Bernanke told the Republican secretary of the Treasury they needed to initiate a full scale bailout of the nation's financial system.

Bernanke says to Paulson, you have to go to Congress. We can't do this anymore on a case-by-case basis.

What was different about this call is that you have this fairly mild-mannered Princeton professor who speaks in a more demanding and assertive tone than he usually does telling Paulson that they really had to do something. They had to turn to Congress and get Congress involved in a broader rescue.

At that point, Paulson bowed to the inevitable. One thing Paulson said to me in an interview is, when the situation changes, you have to be willing to change with the situation.

The next day, Paulson and Bernanke headed to Capitol Hill for that meeting with the congressional leadership.

I had no idea I was gonna hear what I heard. Sitting in that room with Hank Paulson saying to us, in a very measured tone, that unless you act, the financial system of this country and the world will melt down in a matter of days. There was literally a pause in that room where the oxygen left.

Paulson carried an emergency planned his staff had drafted.

The plan was a $700 billion request for that money from the taxpayer to be used to buy the kinds of toxic mortgage securities that were creating so many problems for the banks.

And they said to us to they needed it by Monday. We said, well, that's not reasonable.

Harry Reid, the Senate Democratic leader, said this is the US Senate. We can't move that fast.

Paulson felt that he needed to move swiftly and almost at the economic equivalent of shock and awe.

Hank has never been in this culture before, and the Wall Street culture is obviously different than the Washington culture. So you end up sending up a 3 and 1/2 page bill saying, give me $700 billion. And by the way, no agency can intervene, and no court can intervene. I mean, that's rather remarkable.

We just had what I believe was a very productive meeting.

It's as close to a blank check as you can get without actually asking for a blank check.

Paulson said he wanted the money in order to buy the toxic assets from the banks.

And predictably, the reaction on Capitol Hill was toxic. They were furious.

America, you should be outraged about what Washington is about to do!

It is an unprecedented and unaffordable and unacceptable expansion of federal power that our kids--

Conservative Republicans in the House were in full revolt.

--that we have never seen in the history this country.

But this is essentially Mr. Paulson's bill to help his friends, and I can't buy it.

It became increasingly like The Bonfire of the Vanities, just in terms of the extreme, extreme craziness and all the people going before the camera to pontificate. I mean, it was an insane environment to operate under.

Please, please don't betray this nation's great history!

On September 29, the House of Representatives voted on the bill.

I was in the cloakroom of the Senate watching that vote, and I didn't have a good feeling about it.

The House Republicans, who had initially voiced support for the bailout package, pull their support. Everything falls apart. We're literally sitting in the newsroom. Everyone expects the bill to pass. Then they have the vote, and the bill fails.

They didn't pass it.

They did not pass it.

And I see that the Dow traders are standing there watching in amazement, and I don't blame them.

Look at the Dow Jones Industrial Average.

The market right now is down 521 points.

95 Democrats also voted against the measure.

The shock of the fact that it wasn't going to pass on the first go there was amazing to people. Oh my god, these guys don't know what they're doing. We're in really deep trouble.

I thought it was one of those moments where you could not actually see the bottom. I wasn't sure where the market was going to stop, and I had a very bad feeling that forces had been unleashed that we couldn't control.

A history-making 777-point nosedive.

The plunge was the single greatest point loss in the Dow average in one day ever.

With the market crashing, Congress felt intense pressure to reconsider Paulson's planned to buy the toxic assets. At the same time behind closed doors, another idea was in play. This one involved even more government intervention-- capital injection.

The Fed wanted to do it the way the Swedes did it, do it the way the Japanese did it, do it the way Franklin Roosevelt did it and do capital injections.

Some insiders wanted to inject billions of dollars into ailing banks in order to boost confidence and unfreeze credit, but Paulson didn't like the idea of capital injections.

I think there's just a general distaste for the idea that we're going to have anything that looks like a partial nationalization of the financial system. It was just so alien to where he and his administration were coming from.

Publicly, Bernanke stood by Paulson, supporting the announced plan to purchase toxic assets.

Maybe if Bernanke had been in office longer, he would have been able to say to Paulson, we don't want this to be a game of chicken, but if you go with this plan, I'm going to publicly disagree. You don't want responsibility for that. He probably couldn't do that.

As Paulson held his ground, others quietly inserted six lines of text into the bill, authorizing capital injections.

"If the secretary determines that use of a market mechanism under Section 113(b) to purchase assets--"

If you weren't looking for it, if you didn't know exactly where to go in this many hundred page document, you would simply have missed it entirely.

"--the secretary shall pursue additional measures to ensure--"

By the end of the week, under intense pressure, a revised bill finally cleared the House.

The ayes are 263. The nays are 171. The motion is adopted.

But even before the toxic asset plan could get on track, systemic risk had gone global.

We had a contagion that operated almost around the globe. The panic from Lehman spreads to AIG spreads to Morgan Stanley spreads to Goldman Sachs. Suddenly, Ireland is having problems. Suddenly, the Bank of England is bailing out banks.

Suddenly, Iceland is bankrupt. The state of Iceland, it's bankrupt. An entire country. Suddenly, China has gone from being one of the world's highest growth countries to almost a no growth country in the flash of an eye. That's contagion.

By October, Paulson decided he had no choice. He would have to use that provision in the for capital injections.

And he was put in the position of doing the last thing he wanted to do, which was to step in directly with government capital into the banking system. For him, this is a step. This is a true crossing of the Rubicon.

Then, on Sunday, October 12, something extraordinary. Paulson personally called the CEOs of the nation's nine largest banks and told them to come to his office the next day at the Treasury Building.

Sheila Bair from the FDIC was there.

The meeting was at Treasury. Treasury was holding it close as to what they wanted to talk about at the meeting.

They were all just summoned, show up, and I'm not sure any of them had any idea what was to come.

The nine CEOs sat in alphabetical order across the table from Paulson and Bernanke.

You have Wells Fargo all the way at the end, and you have Bank of America more towards another end. And you have basically the icons of Wall Street who are showing up.

Paulson said the entire banking system was in deep trouble.

That has to be an extraordinary moment, and a difficult moment for Paulson as well. You can only imagine how it must have felt to sit across a table from not only the man who replaced you at Goldman Sachs, but most of the guys that you competed against in your professional career.

It was serious. It was somber, and the government did most of the talking.

It was made clear to these nine very powerful CEOs when they sat down at the table that this wasn't a negotiation.

Paulson hoped one bold act would boost the nation's confidence in the banks and get them lending again-- a direct infusion of cash.

And then he basically came out and said it. We want to take a stake in the largest banks in the country.

Paulson and Bernanke we're offering each of the banks tens of billions. The government would become a major stockholder.

And that then set off a pretty lively discussion.

Some of them were like, I don't want the money. But he's like, you're taking the money.

The government was very assertive. Treasury was very assertive on why the problem was there and why they needed to take it with all the conditions.

Here's the plan. Here's what we're doing. Here's what we need you to do. You'll get the money in a few weeks.

Paulson gave each man a single piece of paper spelling out the conditions.

Before they had to leave town that night, they were told, return this document with your signature on it. And all nine of them did so.

Paulson would spend $125 billion that day. Moral hazard was a thing of the past.

You could almost see the regret in his face as he stepped to the microphone.

Good morning. Today, we are taking decisive actions to protect the US economy. We regret having to take these actions. Today's actions are not what we ever wanted to do, but today's actions are what we must do to restore confidence in our financial system.

In a way, he had to overcome an ideological aversion to the government taking a central role in the financial system.

The government owning a stake in any private US company is objectionable to most Americans, me included.

So it's been a very difficult journey for him.

Business and consumers without access to financing is totally unacceptable.

So Hank Paulson, the happy capitalist warrior who spent his life pursuing and defending free markets, is now the biggest interventionist Treasury secretary we've had since the Great Depression.

We start 2009 in the midst of a crisis.

Last month, Henry Paulson was replaced by President Obama's choice, Tim Geithner. Ben Bernanke will stay on at the Federal Reserve until at least 2010. So far, they have spent $350 billion to save the financial system. They have said they will spend trillions more, and still nobody knows if it will be enough.

Explore more at our website.

I mean, that's rather remarkable.

Watch the full program again online.

If you don't let some people go belly up--

Read Frontline's interviews with insiders and policy makers.

Like The Bonfire of the Vanities.

Explore the analysis of Alan Greenspan's legacy, the decision to let Lehman Brothers go, Paulson's conversion, plus a timeline of how the crisis unfolded. Then, join the discussion at pbs.org.

Frontline is made possible by contributions to your PBS station from viewers like you. Thank you. With major funding from the John D and Catherine T MacArthur Foundation, committed to building a more just, verdant, and peaceful world. With additional funding from the Park Foundation